Why Yield Guild Games invested in League Of Kingdoms
The future of work is not about employment, but finding a network of people who are gathered around a common productive goal, doing the work required to reach that goal and sharing in the upside of that network.
At Yield Guild Games (YGG), our mission is to gather gamers around the play-to-earn Metaverse and invest in assets that help our players earn yield. Our early efforts revolved around our Scholarship Program and Esports teams in Axie Infinity, but we’ve always been on the lookout for other games that we can invest in.
League of Kingdoms first caught our attention because of its interesting business model. It is a multiplayer strategy game (similar to Clash of Clans) that is playable on iOS, Android and web.
At first glance, it looks like any midcore free-to-play strategy game, of which there have been many in the past decade. And that’s the point — it is designed to appeal to the midcore strategy game player with disposable income.
How is it a play-to-earn game? Via its land system, players can buy land as ERC721 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are stored in their Ethereum wallet. Each land owner gets 5% of the in-game resources that are harvested by players on their land.
Moreover, 10% of the net revenue of in-app purchases made by players in the game are shared with land owners in DAI (crypto USD). The higher the land’s in-game level, the higher share of DAI rewards the land owner gets, so land owners are motivated to stay active in the game and develop their land to get a higher share of rewards.
This economic loop results in a positive-sum game that is necessary for any play-to-earn game to work: If 100% of the participants of the game are looking for a financial return, then the game loop becomes zero-sum and adversarial, which ultimately results in toxicity and the death of the game.
Because League of Kingdoms is designed as a strategy game that is meant to attract high-spending, midcore game players on both web and mobile, not all of these players will be interested or even know about the player-owned land system. This means revenue can flow from players who are merely looking to enjoy a strategy game to land owners who are looking to eventually turn a profit on their land investment.
The game is also available on both the iOS App Store and Google Play store, which means it has the capacity to easily reach millions of players around the world, unlike most blockchain-based games that are currently not allowed on the app stores, limiting their distribution reach.
Most importantly for us, our guild members were already playing the game! Yield Guild will only invest in game ecosystems that our players are interested in playing and earning from through their efforts inside the game. This is the reason why YGG does not invest in NFT collectibles or land that does not have a yield bearing element for its players.
Turning Gamers Into Investors
Our goal at YGG is to convert the time spent in-game by players to the financial upside that these virtual economies offer. Instead of “wasting time” playing games, ownership of these assets will turn gamers into investors, helping secure their financial future in the long term through gameplay.
This is why we are letting our YGG Alliance members invest into our League of Kingdoms land estate by buying YGGLOK tokens! The tokens represent the wallet that contains the entire 286 parcel LOK estate of YGG plus all of the resource and DAI rewards that the estate will generate in the future.
- There will be 286,000 YGGLOK tokens, or 1,000 YGGLOK tokens per land parcel.
- Currently, only active members of the YGG Alliance are eligible to buy YGGLOK tokens.
- YGG will be selling up to 30% of the YGGLOK tokens to its active players, while the rest will be kept in the guild treasury. These tokens will be made available to the public via a DEX listing at a later date.
The land estate itself is contained in a 4-of-5 multisig wallet, with the 3 YGG co-founders (Gabby, Beryl, Owl of Moistness) and 2 YGGLOK community leaders (Smallbrowndoge and Fallencorpsez/RonaldPump) as part of the multisig.
The YGGLOK community will have governance control over the resources generated by the land estate, while the guild itself retains ownership of the underlying land NFT parcels. We are hoping that this maximizes skin-in-the-game and financial upside for our Alliance members and motivate our guild members to tend to the land and maximize rewards while playing the game.
This is a model that we hope to replicate across different play-to-earn games, with YGG investing in land and other productive NFT resources and handing them over to our players so that they can earn yield and eventually own resources themselves. We are sowing the seeds for building a new economy in the Metaverse, and supplying the people who are willing and able to perform the jobs (battling, breeding, trading etc.) to develop this new virtual-first economy.
Interested to learn more? Join us at our guild Discord server and let’s build the Metaverse economy together!
-The YGG Team
Thanks to Elle/HackingmoneyPH, Linda Xie, Piers Kicks, and Andrew Steinwold for feedback on this article.
